Madame Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, née Madeleine Chapelle

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ingres and Madeleine Chapelle were introduced by her cousin and corresponded only briefly before Chapelle moved to Rome, where the artist was living at the time; they were married less than a year later. In that brief period, Ingres made four portraits of her, including this one, in which she gazes steadily and lovingly at her soon-to-be husband. Her fuller figure here suggests that she may have been pregnant. The couple’s only offspring was sadly stillborn the year of the portrait’s execution.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art